Manner Of Cruelty
by Silent Seraphim
Summary: Crossover with Law & Order: SVU. Written for the Whodunnit? Challenge. (Tsukimineshrine LJ.)


Challenge: Whodunit?

Title: Manner Of Cruelty  
Genre: Mystery  
Canon: Er— almost non-existent.  
Rating: PG-13

Length: Somewhere around 3500.   
Summary: Law and Order: SVU, season five, CCS, Post Manga/Anime. Flash forward about five years, plant the CCS cast in Manhattan, insert event, and voila, you have this fic.

Warnings: Language, anything else often found in a normal Law & Order episode... (That being violence, crude sexual overtones, graphic descriptions... that kind of thing) I am a very technical person, scientifically speaking, so I'm leaving a glossary of forensic terms used in this fic. Feel free to ask questions. I like answering them... usually.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this for a fan fiction _community._ What more evidence do you need to come up with the deduction that I obviously don't own copyright to either production. Those belong to CLAMP and whoever owns the original idea for the series. 

**Author's notes: This is a bit tardy... and I know it. This is going to be multi-chaptered eventually... but for now, I'm adding this to the whodunit challenge..**.

Cross-posted at , and

Part 1/???

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In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

Manhattan, during the summer, has been described by city dwellers as having various different extremes varying from mild, and temperate to hell's furnace. On this day in particular, it seemed as if hell itself had risen to the fore, and was adding more heat to stoke the inescapable torture that was the _god-awful_, mid-July heat wave that seemingly, had no end in sight.

It did not help matters that the air-conditioner was broken and the precinct, while warm during the winter, had enough insulation to make conditions within it during 90 degree plus temperatures nearly unbearable.

It seemed as if every member of the SVU had donated a couple of fans for the room when Detective Olivia Benson walked in on that intolerably hot Monday morning, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. It wasn't even nine a.m. yet and the temperature inside of the building had already skyrocketed to somewhere around boiling.

She slid off her blazer with a note of exhaustion, and shot a look at John Munch, who was busily tossing a Nerf football back and forth between himself and Detective Odafin Tutuola... otherwise known as 'Fin' for simplicity's sake.

"Has anything new come up on the Darlian case?"

Munch raised an eyebrow. "You actually want to go work on that in _this_ heat?"

Olivia removed the ponytail holder from her hair, and raked her fingers through the haphazard mop. It was far too warm to leave her hair down, so she pulled it back again, this time securing it slightly tighter than the last time.

"Not particularly. Where's Stabler?"

Fin looked up. "He called in sick with something. It sounded like he has the flu."

Olivia grimaced. "Isn't it a bit late for the flu season?"

Munch shrugged, fanning himself with his uglier-than-sin hat. "Unless he ate one of those bagels from that guy's retirement bash downstairs yesterday. Word has it that something was in the cream cheese... half the guys in Homicide are off with food poisoning."

Olivia chuckled. "That's why I stuck to the éclairs."

"I'm amazed you aren't sick, with all of the crap you shove down your throat, Munch." Fin jabbed.

Not five seconds later an ill tempered, frustrated, and particularly livid appearing Captain Donald Cragen came storming from his office, making a direct beeline for three particular detectives.

"Benson?"

She swiveled around in her chair, using her left foot to catch herself as she rolled to a halt in front of her superior. "Yeah? Whatcha got for me?"

The aging, balding, overweight man shoved a manila folder into her hands, and raised an eyebrow. "Kings County D.A. just faxed this to me, along with another case. I need you to go to St. Michaels and check it out. The most I got from that jackass over there was a couple of grunts and an order to get a detective down there."

"Why the hell isn't the Bronx P.D. handling this? It's their territory."

Cragen sighed, the frustration that had been easily apparent earlier growing in intensity. "The victim lives with her mother on the upper east side. Tomoyo Daidouji, seventeen years old, beaten, raped, and sliced up."

"Daidouji? As in, daughter of _the_ one Sonomi Daidouji, head of Daidouji Toy Corp, with the ridiculously famous supermodel for a daughter?"

Cragen nodded dryly.

"Well... fill us in." Olivia stood with her arms crossed.

"Apparently Daidouji dropped her kid and an acquaintance off at about 6 p.m. for a photo shoot. Nine hours later she's found in a hospital parking lot looking like someone used her for knife throwing practice."

Munch sighed, crossing his arms. "Anything else we should know?"

"Keep the media in the dark, and I'm gonna try to do some more damage control." The irritable man turned on his heel and marched back to his office, most likely to spend another half-day on the telephone trying to placate media-mongers and curious civilians alike.

Olivia sighed, shooting a plaintive look at her fellow detectives... who weren't paying attention in the least. Finally, she reached over, grabbed Munch by the sleeve, and dragged him out the door behind her.

"How... what..." The suit clad, pale looking Japanese woman, presumably her mother, turned to her daughter with a tone in her voice that clearly meant that hysterics were on their way, along with the waterworks and sob story.

Munch whistled as he finally got a glimpse of the girl on the gurney, looking to and from the picture in his hand, back to the girl lying, having her breathing and bodily functions carried out for her by the various life-support machinery around the bed.

Detective Benson reached over and smacked him in the arm, warningly. "Who was on duty when she was brought in?"

A black woman in a pair of green scrubs waved a chart over her head. "I was. I'm Dr. Laures."

"How bad is she?"

"Aside from the fact someone used the poor girl for a cutting block... she was already in bad shape. I don't know if she'll pull through. When we ran a tox screen... it came back positive for several different chemicals... most of them present in a common methamphetamine known on the street as 'ice'." The doctor sighed. "She was raped with a foreign object as well. We found these when we ran a rape kit." She held up a small glass bottle.

"What's that?" Munch asked.

"Splinters." She clarified.

Olivia stifled the _'what sort of sick bastard would do something like this'_ that was urging to get past her lips, and turned to the girl's mother... who had absolute horror written over her face.

"Mrs. Daidouji?"

The woman barely registered Olivia's presence. "Do you know what happened to your daughter?"

The woman stared coldly at Olivia, with tears in her eyes. "Of _course I know!_" She snarled. "What I _don't_ know, is how some _son-of-a-bitch_..." The woman trailed off, quite obviously fighting back tears,_ "_Got to my_ daughter!"_

"Mrs. Daidouji, did Tomoyo have any enemies, people with grudges against her?"

The woman shook her head. "Not that I knew of... but then again, Tomoyo wouldn't have told me that kind of thing anyway."

"What time did she leave?"

"I dropped her off at six p.m. at Lizuuini studio on west 40th. She was with a friend."

"What is this friend's name?"

"Kinomoto Sakura... they're cousins. She's staying with me for a few weeks." The woman seemed to be even more disenheartened as she continued. "She never came home last night. Her brother and his friend went looking for them both sometime around 2 this morning, when neither came back..." She trailed off and went into another round of wracking sobs. Olivia frowned.

"Sakura... you haven't seen her either?"

She shook her head. "No... She called me around one a.m. She said that she was worried about Tomoyo... that she'd gotten angry with the photographer about something and that they had argued."

"This photographer... what is their name?"

"Laszlo Puccini." the woman ground from between gritted teeth.

Meanwhile nearby, Munch was still talking to the doctor.

"What are her chances?"

"If she makes it... I cannot honestly say. The sheer amount of petechial hemorrhaging present when we checked her eyes for pupil contracture indicates that at the very least, someone attempted to strangle her, and managed to deprive her of oxygen long enough to cause unconsciousness. Combined with as much intracranial bleeding and bruising that occurred when the victim sustained trauma to her head... it is unlikely that she will ever regain consciousness. However, if she does, she will never regain her former abilities... and will have to be cared for the remainder of her natural life. "

"So- speaking from a realistic objective... she's gonna end up a vegetable, or something close to it."

The doctor nodded. Munch sighed, and tipped his hat lower over his face and turned to Olivia.

"Find out anything useful?"

­

**"**Why do we always get stuck looking for the needle in the haystack?" Fin whirled around in his chair, rolling his eyes as he looked down to the manila file folder in his hands.

Munch scribbled something onto a piece of paper lying on his desk. "Yeah, it reminds me of the Easter egg hunts of my youth."

Fin frowned. "Your family's Jewish, you guys don't hide eggs."

"I know, all those mindless hours of searching..."

Olivia appeared over Munch's shoulder with a dryly-amused expression. "And they've turned out to be fruitful. We've managed to locate the other girl."

Elliot Stabler swallowed the bile rising in his throat and shot a despondent look toward Olivia, who was paying no attention to him, whatsoever, as she lost herself in the artwork lining the massive uptown apartment complex... half of which belonged to Ms. Daidouji.

**"**Tidy..." He murmured, grimacing. "If it were any neater, I'd be convinced that an OCD patient lived here."

"It could use a splash of color." Olivia retorted.

He pointed to a black, grey, and red painting on the wall closest to them. "There ya are..." 

"Blood red wasn't what I had in mind."

"Detectives?" A rather thin young man, with dapple-grey hair, pale skin, with large, hazel eyes hidden behind a pair of nearly too-large glasses appeared from behind a corner, with a surprised expression written over his features. "I'm surprised you arrived so quickly."

"Yeah, well... word travels fast, and an accelerator pedal does wonders in this town." Olivia deadpanned. "Who are you?"

"Kimi wa Tsukishiro Yukito desu." He answered with a short, polite bow. "I assume that you're here to question Sakura-chan?'

"If you're inferring to Kinomoto Sakura, then yes."

"This way then." He motioned for the two detectives to follow him into a side bedroom, where a Japanese girl, probably around fifteen or sixteen years old, sat cross-legged on a bed, with the evidence of recent crying evident on her face. Next to her, lying on the bed... was a very _large_, leonine appearing cat, with some sort of metallic headgear. It looked up at the two detectives, and lay its head on the girl's leg.

Benson and Stabler exchanged identical looks, and stepped back.

"He won't attack you unless I order him to or you give him a reason to." The girl answered, listlessly. "Kero-chan, get off."

The large cat made a show of stretching and took his sweet time in situating himself lazily next to the girl. "Who are you?"

"Can we come in?" Stabler asked, trepidative. He already felt ill, and did not think that running for his life was going to help alleviate the nausea he was currently victim of.

The girl nodded.

"I'm detective Olivia Benson, and this is my partner, Elliot Stabler... we're from the NYPD Special Victim's unit. Do you know why we're here?"

"Tomoyo." She answered, biting her lip. "I couldn't stop him..."

"Who couldn't you stop?"

"The man that... attacked her." She choked, obviously starting to cry again. Olivia frowned. "Did you get a look at them?"

She shook her head, violently so. "No... He tied me to a post, and then started to torture Tomoyo."

"What happened... what was he doing? What was he wearing?"

"He..." She stumbled over her English slightly. "A trench coat."

"Was he tall? Short?"

"Tall... maybe a little bit shorter than Onii-chan..." She trailed off.

Stabler bit his lip, and turned to the boy who had led them in. "Yukito, right?"

The boy nodded.

"Who found her?'

"I did... her brother and I went out and started looking and retracing their steps, according to Tomoyo's acquaintances at the studio. We found Sakura in an alleyway, tied, bound and gagged."

"What about Tomoyo?"

"Apparently they found her in a parking lot." The boy frowned deeply, shooting a look to the currently interrogating Detective Benson, and Sakura, who was sobbing uncontrollably again. He seemed edgy— to the point that it was apparent that the boy knew something. And come hell or high water, he was going to figure it out.

"Tomoyo wasn't with Sakura?"

"No... Whatever attacked them took Tomoyo elsewhere after brutalizing her." Yukito's voice faltered somewhat. Elliot noticed the misspoken word... but before Stabler could press further, the nausea worked its charm again. "Where's the nearest bathroom?"

He pointed. "Right there."

Elliot ran for it, and slammed the door behind him. Yukito looked after him, and then looked back to detective Benson.

"Food Poisoning." She answered.

"Oh." Yukito seemed genuinely concerned for the detective in the bathroom.

­

"Yuka Satotini..." Munch muttered. "That _psycho_ works here?"

"That's what I said."

"She's the 'hangman's' former main squeeze. What's she doing working around all of these models?"

Fin raised an eyebrow. "Old, bad habits are hard to break. Especially old boyfriends who taught you their tricks. There are some old dogs you can't teach new things."

Munch grinned. "But you _can_ put them back in Rikers." The two of them strode through the doors, only to be greeted by an irate looking Satotini at the main desk. "Just who the hell do you people think you are, marching up here like some self-important, pompous, sonofabitches? How did you get past security?" She snarled, glaring daggers at the two men as they strode past her and into the studio where the photographer was busily snapping away at a scene of three half-naked girls, clad in nightgowns that left little to the imagination, sitting in various poses on a white bed.

"Want to answer her, Munch?" Fin asked dryly.

"Sure thing. Ms. Satotini. See, there's this thing called obstruction of justice... I'm sure you know what that is, right? Well... threaten a bouncer-wannabe with a couple of years in jail for a low class felony, and well... I'm sure you can figure out that on your own."

The woman narrowed her eyeliner rimmed eyes. "What do you want?"

"See this." Fin held up a suspiciously familiar blue piece of paper. "It's a note we found in one Tomoyo Daidouji's pocket last night when she was brought in beaten, raped, sliced up and higher than a damn kite. It's from your photographer."

"What he does with those girls is not my business. I run the books. Nothing more."

"I know you would have at least noticed if the two of them were arguing about something."

"No. I would not. I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in the studio."

"You sound a bit bored, Yuka. Maybe this will pique your interest. Tomoyo Daidouji is a minor. Y'know what else we discovered last night when we did a little digging?"

"Enlighten me." She drawled.

He held up a labeled evidence bag. "Does this look familiar to you?"

She managed to school her expression into one of feigned shock. "What's that?"

Fin raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I know that you know what it is, Yuka. Don't play stupid with us. We're not buying it. You'd have to be a lot more convincing than that considering the number of drug charges we could get away with dragging you in on... should you refuse to cooperate with us."

"I don't know anything about it." She adamantly argued. Munch and Fin exchanged identical looks, before moving behind her, and opened her desk."

"What are you doing? You can't search that! You need a warrant!"

Munch grinned. "See, that's the thing. We don't. We have enough reasonable doubt that we think that you are lying... which gives us the privilege to dig through your desk drawers until we find what we want. Speaking of the devil... Lookit what I found, Fin! What's this look like to you?" He held up a baggie of brownish-white, crystallized balls.

"Looks like Meth to me... for someone who doesn't know what it is; you sure have a hell of a lot of it."

Munch adopted the expression of a five year old in a candy store. "You just piqued my interest, Yuka. Mind elaborating?"

She gave him a bored look. "Not without a lawyer."

"If you tell us what we want to know, you'll get a gold star in the cooperation column."

"If I talk, you'll throw me in Rikers for whatever petty charge you can scrape up."

"If it's any consolation prize, Ms. Satotini, if you lend a hand, you'll get a few weeks yanked off the ten you're gonna serve for having this stuff, and lying about having it."

"No deal." She growled.

Fin produced a pair of cuffs while Munch grinned widely. "Fine then, Yuka Satotini, you're under arrest for the possession and distribution of a controlled substance. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and _will_ be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, and should you not be able to afford one, the court will provide one for you..."

The woman glared haughtily at the two men. "I'm not saying another word."

"Good then. We've already reserved a special cell, just for you at Rikers, the deluxe suite, complete with hard bunk, scratchy blanket, and communal showers." Munch grinned, quite satisfied with himself.

"I plead the sixth!"

Fin smirked. "He was getting to that, but yes, you have the right to a fair and speedy trial..."

­

"Are you Laszlo Puccini?"

After dropping off the hissing and spitting Satotini at the station to be booked, they had returned, this time to interrogate the photographer.

"What's it to you?" The nasal, snotty, Italian accent grated at Munch's ears, but he said nothing. "If you're looking to get your daughters modeling contracts, go talk to Yuka."

"Sorry, but we're here to talk to you, Laszlo. NYPD. We wanna ask you a few questions, for starters."

The man rolled his eyes. "Can't you see that I'm busy?"

"Can't you see that we're impatient and if you don't step away from the damn camera, I'm going to break it?" Fin retorted. The man glowered, and told his subjects to take five.

"What do you want?" He asked.

"Do you know Tomoyo Daidouji?"

"Who?" The man raised an eyebrow incredulously. "I don't know who you're talking about."

Munch held up a studio photo of the girl. "Her." He pointed to her.

"Oh, you mean Torii."

Munch and Fin exchanged identical incredulous stares before turning back to the photographer. "I hear that the two of you were in an argument last night. Want to enlighten us on why?"

"She didn't make weight, and I told her to come back when she lost five pounds." He said, as if he were addressing a pair of five year olds.

"She weighs barely 100 pounds as it is, and she's 5'6"." Munch answered. "Tell me why she would need to lose five pounds."

He didn't answer.

"Well then answer me this... why did she, and half of your clientele of Models, have at least one Rock in their possession?" He held up the bag of Crystal Meth, and gave the photographer a hard stare.

"I don't know."

"C'mon. Don't lie to us, pal. We already carted Satotini, your receptionist, in on solicitation. Don't make us book you too."

The man sighed. "Fine. She gives it out to the girls... they use it to keep the weight off."

"That explains why Daidouji registered on the Tox screen. What time did she leave?"

The man raised an eyebrow. "One a.m. But not after her little girlfriend threatened me."

"You probably deserved it." Fin spat. "Do you know where they went?"

"No."

­­­­­­­­­

A/N: This took me longer than I expected... It probably didn't help matters that I paid no attention to the time limit, (was there one?) I completely forgot about my summer homework, and had lots of home improvement crap to occupy myself with.

This isn't exactly my best work... and barely can be considered a crossover... it's more Law & Order than CCS. However, it'll have to suffice for now.

Also... there were breaks between scene changes, but the stupid site ate them.

As usual, blatant honesty is welcome. I don't care for flames, but I'll accept them.

Glossary of Terms:

{1}: Petechial Hemorrhage: Small, pinpoint sized hemorrhages visible in the eyes and eyelids as pinpoint sized red dots. Classic post-mortem sign of strangulation or asphyxiation. Can be present in non-deceased strangulation victims, but rarely.

{2}: Rape kit: Series of tests preformed to determine whether a victim has been raped.

{3}: Tox Screen: Series of tests used to determine the levels of toxic substances in the blood. Also used to detect for the presence of drugs.


End file.
